Just for fun, the latest Rasmussen poll on President
Barack Obama’s popularity will
from now on be published at the head of
the Tallrite Blog. The date is on the charts.
(Click on them to get the latest version.)

As Christmas
draws nigh, our thoughts turn to sleighs and bells and snow. Or, if we
think carbon dioxide has melted the snow, to Copenhagen and the UN’s
fifteenth big Climate
Change Conference, dubbed COP15. The fifteen thousand delegates who
are jetting in from 191 countries across the world had better enjoy it,
for it is likely to be the last such climate change jamboree in their
lifetimes. Despite their desire to establish a world system, which
would replace
the universally broken promises of the Kyoto Protocol by imposing a
global system that would place extra taxes on as
many billions of people as possible, the effort is already doomed.

The reason
is simple but horrible. I am old enough to remember the original
Watergate which destroyed the Nixon presidency in 1974. His re-election
campaign sent a gang to break into the Watergate Hotel to steal
documents from the rival Democratic Party. The hotel name entered the
lexicon as a byword for reprehensible behaviour and has spawned
countless “gates” ever since. Its notoriety derived not so much from
the break-in or use of the stolen documents, as from the attempted
cover-up which ensued. It’s always the cover-up and damage limitation
that attract the greatest opprobrium.

Just look at
what’s
going on
right now in the Catholic Church in Ireland. Outrageous and inexcusable as
the clerical sexual abuses themselves were, what has really enraged
people is the Church’s strenuous and disgraceful efforts to hide these
heinous crimes over the years and in so doing facilitate their continuance.

Despite
efforts by much of the media and conventional wisdom to suppress or
downplay its significance, the climate change movement is slowly
becoming engulfed in a “gate” of its own, for which it has no
coherent answer. Last month an anonymous hacker downloaded an enormous
amount of correspondence spanning decades from the anodyne-sounding
Climatic Research Unit. The CRU, a state-funded department of the
University of East Anglia, is the world’s foremost authority in
gathering and analysing historic climate change data. The CRU has
provided, over the years, a huge amount of material for the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to build into the four
assessment reports it has issued since 1990, along with its numerous
other reports, technical papers and technical material. The IPCC is
regarded by many as the world’s foremost authority on climate change
issues. It is the bedrock of the movement.

The stolen
e-mails, whose authenticity the CRU has confirmed, paint however a horrifying
picture as to how it has conducted its climate business. It turns out
that at even the highest levels of seniority, strenuous efforts have
been made to suppress data and opinions which fail to confirm the
climate change hypothesis that the globe is warming due to
human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases.

Some
examples.

CRU director Philip Jones, together with Pennsylvania State
University’s Michael Mann, originator of the famous “hockey stick”
curve showing temperatures soaring for the past couple of decades,
covertly conspired to stamp down on dissenting views.

Incidentally, this curve prepared in 1998, which appeared in the
IPCC’s
third report in 2001, is highly controversial not only because
it tags recent thermometer readings onto ancient geophysical data, a
very dubious scientific technique. But Dr Mann’s geophysical
data and computer modelling have also been shown to be highly
selective in order to provide the millennium of constant low
temperatures required to demonstrate the hockey stick effect.
In 2003, Canadian environmental economists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick
removed these distortions to show that historical temperatures
for long periods far exceeded today’s. This completely
undermined Dr Mann’s
hockey stick hypothesis.

Moreover, the upper graph is clearly marked “NORTHERN HEMISPHERE”. This is because
inclusion of the even less warming south would have made the
deception even more difficult.

The world has in fact been cooling since 1998.
However the same two scientists conspired to
“hide
the decline”,
as they put it, as it doesn’t fit the global
warming narrative.

They also conspired to delete inconvenient information rather than make it
available to Freedom of Information requests.

In the 1980s CRU scientists
threw away raw temperature data dating back to the 1850s on
which their predictions of global warming are based, which means the
conclusions can never be verified.

The databases have been hopelessly corrupted by the CRU’s own
admission.

The hacked data
show Dr Mann and colleagues apparently trying to engineer, and
thus implicitly to corrupt, the peer review process so as to exclude
peers and journals known to be sceptical of climate change.

The Daily Telegraph has reproduced some of the
raciest quotations from the hacked e-mails. Further
information and analysis are still emerging, but the nature of the CRU
outrage and what it means for the integrity of the climate change
movement can no longer be in doubt.

Watergate was a scandal involving an illegal break-in
followed by a shocking cover-up of the break-in.
“Climategate”
is a scandal involving an illegal break-in which has however revealed a
shocking cover-up of scientific information in order to promote an
anthropogenic global-warming conclusion.

Meanwhile, Al Gore’s
double-Oscar-winning, Nobel-prize-winning movie
“An
Inconvenient Truth”
is steadily being
debunked as a collection of
“Inconvenient Untruths”,
the process accelerated by Climategate. Some
Hollywood types are even demanding that his two Oscars be
rescinded, while he himself, to many the spiritual father of global
warm-mongering, has
chickened out of showing up in Copenhagen, or Nopenhagen as some
wags put it.

Climategate is not a trivial issue.
In my
first ever blog two hundred issues ago, I mentioned that experts had put the total global
cost of reducing CO2 to meet Kyoto commitments at $100 billion per
year for a
century. I don’t know the latest figures but with inflation
both in costs and in expectations at Copenhagen, this number is unlikely
to reduce. It aggregates to ten trillion dollars, money that would
be taken out of everyone’s pockets and would therefore be unavailable
for other causes whether fighting poverty and disease or wealth-creating
capital investment or simply day-to-day consumption.

By way of comparison, the UN and World Bank
have told us that $200 bn is
sufficient to provide all humanity with clean drinking water and
sanitation and thereby avoid two million deaths per year in the developing world.
I know which way I would prefer my money to be spent.

Climategate demonstrates that there has been such a
pervasive atmosphere of scientific fraud within the CRU for so many
years, that no-one can have confidence any longer in whatever it says or
has said, nor in any conclusions others might draw from its material.
How is someone to separate the wheat from the chaff?

Climategate
undermines the whole case for climate change and makes a nonsense of the
upcoming COP15 conference. It’s going to end up as bye-bye
Nopenhagen I reckon. The truth is bound to enter the consciousness of
the general public before too long.

Amazingly, however, people want to go to Copenhagen to
protest against (mythical) climate change rather than against the
climate change fraud that COP15 will attempt to perpetuate.

And if you are wondering what is the real incentive for
the Climategate fraud, consider these numbers, that I included in a post
last year entitled
“Global Warm-mongers Keep on Scamming”. According to the august US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
in 2007,

Amount
collected to investigate and promote the case for, as
well as would-be solutions to, anthropogenic climate
change over the past decade or so = $50 billion.
This comes from the UN, foundations, universities, countless
governments, NGOs, state-owned, private and multinational companies
(including oil majors) and other sources.

Amount
collected over a similar if not longer period to fund the case against anthropogenic climate change = $19 million.
Much of this comes from Exxon/Mobil.

Meanwhile, Al Gore, for one, had about
a million dollars in the bank when he left the Vice Presidency in
2000 and began his global warm-mongering campaign. His worth is
now approaching
a billion.

When recently reading a
mealy-mouthed apology by the rabidly left-leaning Israel-hating New
Statesman for an anti-Semitic cover cartoon it ran way back on 14
January 2002, I happened upon this remarkable sentence:

“To call somebody a
‘white bastard’
is just not the same as calling somebody a
‘black
bastard’,
with all its connotations of humiliation and enslavement. Given the
distribution of power in our world, discrimination by blacks or
Asians against whites will almost always be trivial.”

In a stroke, it
trivialises and thus legitimises all instances of white racism, thereby
exonerating people like Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright, Robert Mugabe, for their
overtly anti-white leanings. No matter what you say against white people,
now matter how you discriminate against honkies, no matter how publicly
you disparage the palefaces in thought word or deed, you are, according
to the New Statesman, totally unable to perpetrate a racist act of any
sort.

And it turns any white who is glad
to be white into an automatic racist because he doesn’t want to turn
brown or black.

The modern anti-white
interpretation of the otherwise neutral word racism
is quite remarkable, but it appears to set a template for the
contemporary fashion of “hate-isms”.

Does
anyone seriously consider that actions which disadvantage males
(ineligible to join the Women’s Institute, child allowance paid to the
mother not the father, state-funded clinics for breast-check but not
prostrate-check) would be regarded as sexist? Of course not. A
woman is incapable of acting in a sexist way against men. Only men
are capable of sexism (hence the
fury among Irish feminists when
Ireland’s Supreme Court recently ruled that a men-only golf club could
remain so.) Women frequently demand female quotas for
particular jobs - parliamentary representation and board room seats in
particular. Even though
such demands inherently demean all women by declaring that they
possess insufficient talent and appeal to succeed on their own, no-one
wants to point out that such quotas are blatantly sexist in that they
discriminate against men.

Last month Ireland appointed as its
next EU Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn
“ahead of other well-qualified candidates”
just because she’s a woman, in other words not on her own merits.
This was in obeisance to the
instruction of European Commission president José Manuel
Barroso: “I would ... urge you to pay particular attention to the
presence of women in the college [of Commissioners]”.
How humiliated she must feel as she takes up her new role; how the male
Commissioners will snort in derision behind her back.

And the same goes for the never-elected-to-anything Baroness
Catherine Ashton, the EU’s new Lisbon-enabled Foreign Minister or whatever
she’s called. As President Sarkozy
put it, she got the job because she’s a female centre-left Brit,
certainly not because she has superior ability, much less any expertise in
foreign affairs where her experience is zilch.

This kind of
humiliation is all a natural consequence when
only one kind of sexism is acknowledged

Ageism

This is
something invented to allow older people to whinge when they are
compulsorily retired or when younger workers are promoted ahead of them
or paid more. If you’re in your twenties, try seeing how far you
get when you point out that it’s ageist for over 65s to get the bus-pass
(paid for out of your taxes) just because they’re over 65 and you’re
not. It’s just not possible for an older person to behave in an
ageist fashion against a youngster. And if you try to argue that
you shouldn’t have to subsidize old folk solely because they haven’t
bothered to prepare for their own old age during the 50 long years that
were available to them, well then that proves you’re just an ageist.

Blasphemy

There is
great excitement these days about blasphemy as people conclude it is
wrong to denigrate another’s choice of religion, even though unlike skin
colour it is no more than a personal choice. Ireland’s 1937 Vatican-approved constitution, the EU’s oldest after Belgium’s, forbids blasphemy
(the Christian variety, obviously) yet it
was only this year that the Justice Minister, scrabbling for something
to fill his time, decided to create a law proscribing it. So that
means no more ridiculing of God, Jesus, Buddha, Yahweh, Shiva, Krishna
and all the other gods and saints that people like to worship.

What’s that? I forgot a pair?
Allah and Mohammed? I think you get my drift. For in fact all this
abhorrence about blasphemy is directed solely at those last two.
If you make fun of the others, draw
cartoons about them, configure them in
jars of urine,
blow up 1500-year-old world heritage statues of them, everyone is
perfectly cool. Some crazy religious nuts might be offended but
who cares - they should get a life. Oh, but express the slightest
negative observation about Allah or Mohammed and you are immediately a
culturally insensitive boor who deserves the full weight of the law to
descend upon you, if a scimitar hasn’t sawn your head off first.
In today’s craven world, it is impossible to blaspheme against any
religion but Islam.

Last month a cover
of the Economist illustrated this neatly, with a fauxtograph of Jesus with high explosives rocketing
him into the sky, as compared to Mohammed the Dane, with the high explosives
under his hat. One image is OK, the other is not (and has never
been reproduced in the Economist).

Acceptable

Unacceptable

Rocket-propelled
Jesus

Bomb-in-the-turban Mohammed

Which brings us to
Islamophobia, not Christianophobia, not Judeaophobia, not
Hinduphobia, not Shintuphobia, not Taophobia, not even atheophobia or
agnosticophobia. It seems when it comes to religion there is only
one that merits the tag phobia.

Curiously though,
Islamophobia means only that you the infidel fear Islam, which should surely be
a cause of rejoicing for Muslims rather than objecting. But the word is used,
incorrectly, to mean hatred, a very different human feeling. Misosislam would be more accurate as this prefix means not fear but hate
(as in misogyny, hatred of women). Nevertheless the point remains
- though shalt be free to hate any religion but Islam.

Anti-Semitism: This
is especially interesting because it does not exist. It is today
perfectly acceptable to express your hatred of and disdain for Jews all
you like so long as you cloak this with the thinnest of veneers.
This usually means that you must object not to Jews but only to the current
Israeli government or Israel itself or the shadowy pro-Zionist cabals that bribe Western
governments, bankers, businessmen and media. Sometimes it is
sufficient merely to say you despise
“neo-cons” (because some have names like Woflowitz, Perle, Feith and no doubt
Shylock). Thus the Guardian
newspaper not only regularly berates Israel, but fosters a
“Comment
is Free”
debating line which is rife with
anti-Semitism anti-Israelism,
but which systematically deletes and bans pro-Israel contributors and
whose moderator is (secretly) the
daughter of the Editor.

Of course Muslims need not be circumspect at all, as the rest of the
world regards their brand of anti-Semitism not as real anti-Semitism but
as just another attractive facet of their rich cultural inheritance.
For example,

Iran
andHamas
openly call for the elimination of Jews (while denying the
Holocaust);

almost every Islamic country disbars Jews from
its territory and it is a given that any future Palestinian state
will be ethnically cleansed of its Jews;

The UN Human Rights Council (which
includes Iran, Libya, Syria, Cuba) focuses on
the human right of not having any Jews in the world.

Everyone - even the most rabid
Jihadists - denies being anti-Semitic; they just don’t like Israel and
the pigs and apes that inhabit it. Anti-Semitism? What
anti-Semitism?

Homophobia

While I must admit I have not known (in either the
Biblical or non-Biblical sense) many uncloseted gays and lesbians,
neither have I
known them ever to express any contempt or hatred for straight
people. Good for them, because the reverse is not true.

Nevertheless, for purely academic purposes it would be interesting to
meet a group of homosexuals who despised me just because I am
different from them. For would that not be just as heinous as
hating gays because they’re gay. However, I can’t see myself
getting much sympathy, much less redress from the courts, for complaining that a bunch of lesbians and ladyboys
jeered at me for being straight.

Anyone heard of the Straight Police
Association, to promote the interests of non-gay cops? I thought not,
and you never will.

These few examples illustrate that homophobia
(or misohomo as it should properly be called) is only allowed to be a
one-way street. Indeed, even a declaration that you are grateful to be
straight rather than homosexual contains within it a nuance of homophobia in
today’s touchy environment.

_______________

So let me sum up. I am a white
hetero male Christian, who is glad to possess those attributes. I dislike the
religion and ideology of Islam because of the brutality and fascism it
preaches and I dislike anti-Christian blasphemy because I am a
Christian. I don’t think oldsters should receive perks funded by
but not available to younger taxpayers.

Thus if only I were young again, I could truly be described
as an ageist, racist, sexist, misoislamist, misoblasphemist, to which
some might (incorrectly) add misohomo. But I
am a little too old to be a true ageist any longer so I will just have
to glory in the other five hate-isms.

Oh to be an elderly, African,
female, anti-Semitic (secretly gay) Muslim sawing the head off a
Mohammed cartoonist. There would be no end to the scope of my
immunity and my victimisation.

Hate-isms operate in only one
direction. The approved groups alone are privileged to find
themselves never on the delivery side of hate-isms; they are always the
lucky victims.

I became very close to my mother, as my father showed no interest in
me.

My mother died at an early age from cancer.

Although my father deserted me and my mother raised me, I later
wrote a book idolizing my father not my mother.

Later in life, questions arose over my real name.

My birth records were sketchy.

No one was able to produce a legitimate, reliable birth certificate.

I grew up practicing one faith but converted to Christianity, as it
was widely accepted in my new country, but I practiced
non-traditional beliefs and didn’t follow Christianity, except in
the public eye under scrutiny.

I worked and lived among lower-class people as a young adult,
disguising myself as someone who really cared about them.

That was before I decided it was time to get serious about my life
and I embarked on a new career.

I wrote a book about my struggles growing up.

It was clear to those who read my memoirs, that I had difficulties
accepting that my father abandoned me as a child.

I became active in local politics in my 30s. Then, with help behind
the scenes, I literally burst onto the scene as a candidate for
national office in my 40s.

They said I had a golden tongue and could talk anyone into anything.

I had a virtually non-existent résumé, little work history, and no
experience in leading a single organization.

Yet I was a powerful speaker and citizens were drawn to me, as
though I were a magnet and they were small roofing tacks.

I drew incredibly large crowds during my public appearances.

This bolstered my ego.

At first, my political campaign focused on my country’s foreign
policy, I was very critical of my country in the last war, and
seized every opportunity to bash my country.

But what launched my rise to national prominence were my views on
the country’s economy.

I pretended to have a really good plan on how we could do better,
and every poor person would be fed and housed for free.

I knew which group was responsible for getting us into this mess.

It was the free market, banks and corporations.

I decided to start making citizens hate them and, if they became
envious of others who did well, the plan was clinched tight.

I called mine “A People’s Campaign”.

That sounded good to all people.

I was the surprise candidate because I emerged from outside the
traditional path of politics and was able to gain widespread popular
support.

I knew that, if I merely offered the people “hope”, together we
could change our country and the world.

So, I started to make my speeches sound like they were on behalf of
the downtrodden, poor, ignorant to include “persecuted minorities”.

My true views were not widely known and I kept them unknown, until
after I became my nation’s leader.

I had to carefully guard reality, as anybody could have easily found
out what I really believed, if they had simply read my writings and
examined those people I associated with.

I’m glad they didn’t.

Then I became the most powerful man in the world.

And the world learned the truth.

Who am I?

I am Adolf Hitler.

Source: Barry O'N

If you were thinking of
another charismatic national leader you
should be concerned, very concerned!

What’s with the world’s SuperBower? Does he really
believe that grovelling before dictators and hereditary emperors somehow
enhances the standing (so to speak) of the world’s oldest constituted
democracy?

He seems to have warmed up in London during his first
presidential visit to Europe with with an absurd
“reach across the aisle”
handshake gesture to Communist China’s illegitimate dictator Hu Jintao.

London, 1 April 2009, G20
A Western democracy
“reaches across the aisle”
to an illegitimate Communist dictator

France’s little squirt Sarkozy then shows him, with a
smirk, how
“reaching across the aisle”
is supposed to work when dealing with illegitimate dictators.

London, 1 April 2009, G20
The illegitimate Communist dictator
“reaches across the aisle”
to a Western democracy

Undaunted, the SuperBower than got down (down being the
operative word) to real business when he was graciously granted a few
moments of precious one-to-one time with Abdulla the illegitimate tyrant
of Saudi Arabia. How Sarkozy and Spain’s Zapatero enjoyed the
moment; as you can see they could scarcely contain their derisive
laughter.

Paris, 3 April 2009, NATO
A Western democracy bows low before an illegitimate Islamic hereditary
dictator
(while French and Spanish bystanders guffaw)

Then it was onwards and downwards to Japan where the
Chosen One was granted another audience with an Exalted Presence . Here
it was to the world’s only emperor, Akihito, (unelected) incumbent of the world’s
oldest (1350 years) hereditary monarchy, that the SuperBower rendered
homage, stooping even lower than to that illegitimate Arab despot.

Tokyo, 14 November 2009
A Western democracy bows even lower
before an Oriental dynastic emperor and empress

Not content with semi-prostrating himself before
dictators and emperors, the SuperBower then decided, perhaps in a fit of
atypical egalitarianism, that he needed to extend his kowtows to a wider
group of beneficiaries slightly lower down in the hierarchy of
illegitimate despotic power.

Shanghai, November 2009
A Western democracy humbly bows to
mere functionaries of a Communist Chinese Dictatorship

Who can make sense of all this outreach, bowing,
scraping, prostrating and kowtowing to individuals who (all but
one) have - unlike the US president - no legitimate right to hold the
positions they hold, never having been granted the assent of the peoples
on whom they impose their tyrannical rule?

Well, it seems Michael Ramirez can. He is a
brilliant two-time Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist for
Investors Business Daily.

He provides the real explanation. Americans, observe
and weep. While the rest of us cringe in sympathetic embarrassment
at the antics of the ignorant juvenile man you (so foolishly) elected as
president. On whom will he next bestow his insulting grovel?

We all enjoyed the story about Tareq and Michaele Salahi,
the polo-playing society couple from Virginia, who with extraordinary
chutzpah blagged their way into Barack Obama’s glitzy first state dinner
at the White House on 24 November. Playing the part to the full,
they arrived in a chauffer-driven stretch SUV, she a beautiful blonde in
a striking red sari-style silk dress (in polite tribute to guest of
honour President Manmohan Singh of India), he in a dapper dinner jacket.

Putting on an air of supreme confidence, the glamorous
couple swept into the White House and past the first security checkpoint
with nary a sideward glance. Evidently the three uniformed Secret
Service officers manning the desk felt too intimidated to confirm their
identities against the guest list. Then, once the Salahis had gone
through the metal-detector to check for guns, they were in.

They
mingled among the 338 guests, a
mix of wonky Washington, Hollywood A-listers, prominent figures from
the Indian community in the US, and Obama friends, family and campaign
donors. They chatted, shook hands and got photographed with dozens of
people including White House Chief of Staff
Rahm Emanuel,
Vice President Joe Biden and the US President himself.

And
as the guests were eventually called for dinner, the two gate-crashers
discreetly departed the scene to avoid being rumbled as obviously there
was no place set for them at the table.

Mark Sullivan, the grim-looking director of the Secret
Service was hauled before the Congressional Committee on Homeland Security
to explain himself. He testified that the security breach was
the fault of the Secret Service, and that the agency was deeply
embarrassed. But he went on to
blame the lapse entirely on the the three hapless Secret Service
personnel at the guard post who had since been sent on “administrative
leave”. He put it all down to “human
error”, rejecting any notion that it might be symptomatic of a
series of management deficiencies. “The security break down was
not an institutional problem. I believe it is an isolated
incident,” Sullivan declared.

He is almost certainly wrong. Such mishaps never
occur in isolation and can never be attributed to a single factor.
Industrial psychology research repeatedly demonstrates that incidents
are caused

“human error” is the first refuge of the scoundrel. It is
always a sham, but it creates an easy solution (“fire the bastard who
did it”) while relieving the organization of any real responsibility
or need to take substantive action. But there are always
underlying problems behind the incident and since, under the
“human error” excuse nothing is done to
resolve them and a certain smugness sets in, a recurrence of related incidents becomes more, not less,
likely.

In the gatecrasher case, institutional contributory factors identified by
journalist Ronald Kessler who has written a
book about the President’s secret service,
include:

Secret
Service officers and agents are forced to work ridiculous hours
because of short-staffing.

The agency
has a habit of corner-cutting, including

not passing people through
magnetometers

or shutting the devices down early,

cutting back on
the size of counter-assault teams,

and not even allowing agents time
for regular firearms requalification or physical training.

The agency
does not necessarily back officers and agents when, in the face of
political pressure, they follow the rules.

As one example, when Dick
Cheney’s daughter Mary insisted that the Secret Service take her
friends to restaurants, and the detail refused, the Secret Service
acceded to her request to have her detail leader removed.

It easy to
imagine that the Secret Service Uniformed Division officers who let
the Salahis in feared repercussions if they turned away the
scintillating couple.

According to Mr Kessler, overworked, underappreciated,
and infuriated by senseless transfer policies, agents are resigning in
increasing numbers, forcing the agency to hire inexperienced,
less-qualified agents. Within the Uniformed Division alone, the
attrition rate is 12% a year.

Mr Sullivan would be far wiser to delve into these kinds
of areas than try to slide out of any meaningful action by blaming it
all on a convenient case of “human error”. Otherwise Mr
Obama should remove him forthwith from his position as Secret Service
boss as it means he has become a menace and a threat to the
President’s security.

Melanie Philips on BBC Question TimeComment in
the Spectator-hosted Melanie Philips BlogWell done on QT,
Melanie. In particular, you defended the Iraq war brilliantly, and also
were brutal about the global warm-mongering scam. But I couldn’t help
noticing that Dimbleby, despite his promise ...

Fake religious images with explosivesLetter to The Economist I was astonished
to see on the cover of your edition of November 14th what appears to be
the prophet Mohammed being driven into the skies by explosives under his
feet. Is this the same newspaper that discussed the notorious Danish
cartoons ...

A fifth columnist, by Presidential appointment?Comment in the Spectator-hosted Melanie Philips Blog"Greg D @Logdon"
writes, "I agree that radical Islam poses a deadly threat to the West
... Iran does not threaten the West directly. It threatens Israel."
Hello-o-o-o! Israel is an intrinsic part of "the West",
just as ...

Quote: “[US] Department of Defense should allow Muslim
Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious
Objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.”

Nidal Hasan, US Major and Islamic Jihadist
murderer,
in a lecture to fellow-psychiatrists
prior to his massacre of 13 fellow-soldiers at Fort Hood

Quote: “Her efforts were superb ... She happened to
encounter the gunman. In an exchange of gunfire, she was wounded but
managed to wound him four times. It was an amazing and
aggressive performance by this police officer.”

Barely
five foot tall, she is a civilian police officer
stationed at the base, who
immediately and fearlessly confronted
the Jihadist murderer Major Nidal Hassan,
bringing him down with four bullets
while
taking three shots herself, in the leg and wrist.

Quote: “These are men and women who have made the
selfless and courageous decision to risk, and at times, give their
lives to protect us. It’s difficult enough when we lose these brave
men and women overseas. It is horrifying when we lose them on
American soil.”

A moving tribute by president Obama
to the thirteen military personnel killed in a shooting spree
by Major Hasan,
a psychiatrist no less,
who disapproved of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
and was about to be deployed there.

Thirty more people were injured before Sgt Munley thankfully shot
him.

Quote:
“Nidal Hassan is a hero
... The only way a Muslim can justify serving in the US
military is if he intends to follow in the footsteps of men like
Nidal ... The American Muslims who condemned his actions have
committed treason against the Muslim Ummah and have fallen into
hypocrisy.”

Anwar al Awlakia, a radical American imam living in Yemen,
who had contact with two 9/11 hijackers,
praises as a hero the Fort Hood mass-murderer

Quote:
“Some [Guantánamo]detainees would rather stay put than go on trial in the US, where
they would probably receive a life sentence or could wait years for
a death sentence to be carried out. They know there will not
be the same privileges as here. Given the choice of being sentenced
forever in Guantánamo or moved to a Supermax [gaol within the
US], it is
‘no, can I stay in Gitmo?’.
Here they can be outside, they can smell the sea.”

An Arab American cultural adviser,
for security reasons identified only as
“Zak”,
who is employed at Guantánamo to liaise with detainees.

Seems Guantánamo is not so bad after all.

Maybe that’s why Attorney General Eric Holder
wants to bring them to New York

Quote: “I’m concerned that this increased speculation could
cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I’ve asked
our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that.”

With such priorities, General George Casey,
the US Army’s top officer, who also
“doesn’t
rule out terrorism”
[D’oh],
sounds like he is ready for a career change.

Quote:
“Where there are no Muslims, the problem
of jihadist terrorism does not exist either.”

Astute observation by Irish columnist and
polemicist Kevin Myers.

He reminds his readers that neither of these
entities exist in
Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Iceland, Japan, Mozambique, Taiwan.

- - - - - O B A M A - - - -

Quote:
“Few would have foreseen ... that a united Germany would
be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would
be led by a man of African descent.”

President Barack Obama makes clear,
in a video message to the world
on the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall
that had imprisoned East Germans for 28 long years,
that it was all about, well, Mr Obama

Quote:
“Brazil, Japan, China, Russia and Israel are all countries
[which] have come to see Obama as a diffident, dithering,
doubting dilettante who can be dissed with impunity.”

Ouch! Former presidential aspirant Pat Buchanan
observes that foreign leaders are not impressed
by the new US president’s foreign policy

Droll headline in the (Irish edition of) The
Sun, commenting on
the story of Tiger Woods and
his three (at latest count) glamorous mistresses,
which seemed to have resulted in his wife
chasing him out of the house with a three-iron

Quote: “They [the Football Association of Ireland] have asked very humbly
... can’t we be team number 33 in the world cup. Yes,
they have asked for it really!”

Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, mocks - to
widespread laughter -
Ireland’s pathetic attempt to be allowed play
in next year’s World Cup Finals in South Africa,
after having been eliminated by France due to a hand-ball.

How exactly a knockout tournament was to have
been staged
with an odd number of teams the FAI did not explain.

For some time now I have
lamented the fact that major issues are overlooked while manyunnecessary
bills come to me for consideration. Water reform, prison reform, and health
care
are major issues my Administration has brought to the table, but the
Legislature just kicks
the can down the alley.

Yet another legislative year has
come and gone without the major reforms Californians overwhelmingly
deserve. In light of this, and after careful consideration, I believe it is
unnecessary
to sign this measure at this time.

“The Lemon Tree”, by Sandy
Tol (2006),
is a delightful novel-style history of modern Israel and Palestine told
through the eyes of a thoughtful protagonist from either side, with a
household lemon tree as their unifying theme.

But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as

Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in
refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in
Russia.

The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that
had become poisonous and incompetent.

However the book is gravely compromised by a
litany of over 40 technical and stupid
errors that display the author's ignorance and
carelessness.

It would be better
to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying.

As for BP, only a
wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will
prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once
mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history.

This is
nonagenarian Alistair Urquhart’sincredible story of survival in the Far
East during World War II.

After recounting a
childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen,
Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on
Germany in 1939.

From then until the
Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr
Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall
of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror.

After a wretched
journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless
garrison.

Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in
1941, he is, successively,

part of a death march to Thailand,

a slave labourer on the Siam/Burma
railway (one man died for every sleeper laid),

regularly beaten and tortured,

racked by starvation, gaping ulcers
and disease including cholera,

a slave labourer stevedoring at
Singapore’s docks,

shipped to Japan in a stinking,
closed, airless hold with 900 other sick and dying men,

torpedoed by the Americans and left
drifting alone for five days before being picked up,

a slave-labourer in Nagasaki until
blessed liberation thanks to the Americans’ “Fat Boy” atomic
bomb.

Chronically ill,
distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the
British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s
is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this
unputdownable book.

There are very few
first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese
brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical
document.

+++++

“Culture of Corruption:
Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies”

This is a rattling good tale of the web
of corruption within which the American president and his cronies
operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both
a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and
sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP.

With 75 page of notes to back up - in
best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing
allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with
the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife.

ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community
organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine
it is.

+++++

This much trumpeted sequel to
Freakonomics is a bit of disappointment.

It is really just
a collation of amusing
little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour
and situations. For example:

Drunk walking kills more people per
kilometer than drunk driving.

People aren't really altruistic -
they always expect a return of some sort for good deeds.

Child seats are a waste of money as
they are no safer for children than adult seatbelts.

Though doctors have known for
centuries they must wash their hands to avoid spreading infection,
they still often fail to do so.

Monkeys can be taught to use washers
as cash to buy tit-bits - and even sex.

The book has no real
message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and
try to look for simple rather than complex solutions.

And with a final
anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in
its tracks. Weird.

++++++

A remarkable, coherent attempt by Financial Times economist Alan Beattie
to understand and explain world history through the prism of economics.

It's chapters are
organised around provocative questions such as

Why does asparagus come from Peru?

Why are pandas so useless?

Why are oil and diamonds more trouble
than they are worth?

Why doesn't Africa grow cocaine?

It's central thesis
is that economic development continues to be impeded in different
countries for different historical reasons, even when the original
rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:

Argentina protects its now largely
foreign landowners (eg George Soros)

Russia its military-owned
businesses, such as counterfeit DVDs

The US its cotton industry
comprising only 1% of GDP and 2% of its workforce

The author writes
in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to
digest.

However it would
benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative
points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide
natural break-points for the reader.

+++++

This is a thrilling book of derring-do behind enemy lines in the jungles
of north-east Burma in 1942-44 during the Japanese occupation.

The author was
a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to
harass Japanese lines of
command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide
intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of
India.

Irwin is admirably yet brutally frank, in his
descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a
prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing
in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness.

He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of
Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved
authority of the British.

The book amounts to a very human and exhilarating tale.

Oh, and Irwin
describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF
Brennan.